Antrim’s ‘Afterlife’ exquisitely told
“The Afterlife”
by Donald Antrim (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 193 pages, $21)
A robe of fantastical design, bedecked with ribbons, lace, angel-shaped tassels, shining stars, metallic birds, a torn heart of green silk, flowers, giraffes, sachets and pendants – coins, seashells, starfish, a lion and horse – lies at the center of Donald Antrim’s stunning memoir “The Afterlife.”
Called “The Heroine’s Journey,” the garment is a wearable yet daunting work of art by his mother, Louanne Self Antrim, whose life was defined – and ruined – by addictions to alcohol and cigarettes.
“The power of my mother’s robe is the power that was strongest in her at the end of her life. This was the power to force away the people she loved,” writes Antrim.
Antrim, whose fiction has been excerpted in The New Yorker, is known for his command of the surreal. Here he proves that real life can outdo any invented oddness.
What Antrim writes – baring layer by layer his complex entanglement with his mother, whom he loved greatly, hated passionately, abandoned and cared for – is shocking and heartbreaking and occasionally quite funny. Along the way, he also reveals much about his own flawed self.
The memoir opens after Louanne has died of lung cancer and the extreme debilitation brought on by decades of drinking and smoking. Her son finds himself wanting a new bed for his New York apartment, and so begins a comedy of purchases and returns, a parade of mattresses each more luxurious than the last, but none that meets his increasingly impossible standards.
It is not a bed he wants, it is a refuge. And he realizes he is wrestling with a primal fear that within the mattress lies his mother, dragging him down and enveloping him as she did in life.
As his obsession with the perfect bed grows, he tells us his family’s history and how his father, after an affair, had divorced his mother, only to remarry her and then divorce her again.
“I became my mother’s confidant,” Antrim explains. “In doing so, I became her true husband, the man both like and unlike other men. And, in becoming these things, I became sick.”
Antrim takes us on a roundabout journey to places they lived but never quite fit in – Florida, the Blue Ridge area of Virginia, North Carolina – and introduces other family members, including his sister, his college professor father and his grandparents.
We also meet his uncle Eldridge, another heavy drinker who lived with his mom and kept a trunk full of sports equipment and other manly toys in his car. Both a mentor and mystery to his nephew, he at last goes too far in a wrestling match whose import leaves the reader stunned.
But these are minor characters compared to the lost yet ever-alluring Louanne, whose rages and rampages terrify her son even as they bind him to her.
As she lies dying in her parents’ old home in North Carolina, he flies to her side. Yet even as he takes care of her, he becomes convinced she has hidden her father’s final will – the better to cheat him and his sister out of a portion of their inheritance.
Obsession and love, betrayal and forgiveness, all are unflinchingly described. The story is exquisitely told, an heroic, revelatory journey.
Antrim’s rebuke and tribute to this impossible woman reads like a love letter – and hurts like a bereft child’s wail.